An interview on Wired.com is a conversation with World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack conducted during BlizzCon 2011. They discuss the new pets and the upcoming expansion to determine if the MMORPG has jumped the shark, or in this case, the panda. Here's his take on whether kung fu pandas are a shark-jumping moment:

We donít really worry about that because we really feel that our fans are going to be really excited about it. We have the community thatís really excited about what weíre doing.

The team is really excited about doing it. So thatís really whatís important. When it comes out, itís going to be great. I can understand the concept of ďWhy isnít there a big bad guy?Ē in this expansion? But how many times can we say, ďThis bad guy is going to destroy the world now and this time itís serious? No, this guy, heís really, really, really, really bad!Ē

So taking a break from that was very conscious and just having a very different tone. Instead of Horde and Alliance, we team up to defeat the big evil. Itís about the discovery of this new land and how the conflict of the Horde and Alliance influences that. With [the continent of] Outland [in the Burning Crusade expansion] and then with Northrend [Lich King] we had these self-contained areas where players came for an adventure in the higher level. That was really successful.

With Cataclysm, we didnít have that. It was very much focused on redoing the entire levels 1-60 experience. You didnít have, ďThis is the high level area.Ē So thatís something we actually want to get back to, that kind of experience and that kind of visual.

Many folks miss 25man raids and these days my guild is lucky to get a reliable 10man raid up, leaving many dps players left out.

I do miss 25s. The guild I ran with ended up basically splitting into two 10s most nights, and then once a given dungeon was learned by everyone, combining into a 25 the following week...unless they were short people, and then it was back to 10s again.

I really wish blizz had reconsidered that in 5.0, but I've seen no mention of them changing their mind on it.

As it is, I'm done, and off to TOR. I quit wow in march, and while I purchased a 60 day card awhile back (a group was wanting to do uldar and ICC, two of my favorites), I don't think I logged in more than 5 times in that 60 days.

Yup and thats what I immediately thought of when I saw the video two weeks ago along with several other of my guildmates.

Most of the folks I know these days aren't too interested in WoW, just hanging around to kill Rags here and there. Several of my guildmates have let their subs run out this month and last month saying they'll be back online once SWTOR starts in December. Cata killed WoW for a lot of people, casual and hardcore.

Many folks miss 25man raids and these days my guild is lucky to get a reliable 10man raid up, leaving many dps players left out.

Im not happy about it. Cata was a joke already. And now they are adding another literal joke. Why cant they go back to the roots and make WoW more again like it was before an expansion or at max after BC?

I for one spit on every Pandaren pet I see.

Waiting for BIS to come back to their senses and do a real ArmA 2 successor.

MrGrosser wrote on Nov 8, 2011, 15:22:Sorry, I was joking. I got Cata the day it came out. Within a month or two, I was done. The game changed from what used to be fun, yet sometimes tedious to just tedious all the time.

WoW is tedious? Buhahhahaahahha!!!

Sorry that is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. I never got into the game because it was such a easy, casual gamer, boring, pile of shit. Why do you think people made jokes like 'you can level up 3 times by just dropping your mouse'.

It may be absurd, but after the race to 85 was done, then, all that was left it seemed was grinding fraction rep. That is fun for some, but just doesn't cut it for me. To each their own I guess.

MrGrosser wrote on Nov 8, 2011, 15:22:Sorry, I was joking. I got Cata the day it came out. Within a month or two, I was done. The game changed from what used to be fun, yet sometimes tedious to just tedious all the time.

WoW is tedious? Buhahhahaahahha!!!

Sorry that is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. I never got into the game because it was such a easy, casual gamer, boring, pile of shit. Why do you think people made jokes like 'you can level up 3 times by just dropping your mouse'.

Casual games are some of the most tedious games around...

"Back in my MMO days we grind'd uphill both ways and when we died we lost a whole level! You kids and your WoW have it so easy with your casual clickin."

MrGrosser wrote on Nov 8, 2011, 15:22:Sorry, I was joking. I got Cata the day it came out. Within a month or two, I was done. The game changed from what used to be fun, yet sometimes tedious to just tedious all the time.

WoW is tedious? Buhahhahaahahha!!!

Sorry that is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. I never got into the game because it was such a easy, casual gamer, boring, pile of shit. Why do you think people made jokes like 'you can level up 3 times by just dropping your mouse'.

I have a coworker who is actually resubscribing when Pandas launch. He's really big into "griefing" (still plays UO) and is planning on being dominate in the pokemon game with offensively named cockroaches. His reasoning being that everyone will be doing new content but he is just going to grind the pokemon portion using garbage.

My guess however is that a maxed "awesome dragon-ling" will be better than a maxed "cockroach" anyway.

Up until last month I'd been a WoW subscriber from launch, and was able to participate in the beta. That was what, 7 years ago? That's not bad legs for a game, but at some point one gets tired of the mechanics, lore, art, etc. In the end I was only playing because my wife does and not that often as I had a stack of unplayed games I suddenly realized needed my attention (and boy did I almost miss out on some good stuff).

Funny thing though, I cancelled my sub the day before the MoP announcement, and when I saw it I thought "perfect timing". The wife is not impressed with the planned expansion either, which is okay because she is getting into other games. Skyrim hooooo........!!!

I'm not going to say that the game is dead, that is ridiculous, but it is losing it's appeal for a lot of users. I myself am still a member of the same raiding guild that has been going strong since the early days of TBC. We're currently one of the top ranked 10man guilds in the world, with the same core group we had back in TBC, and since this announcement at least half of our group has said they are quitting after we kill Deathwing in 4.3. Some of us have resubscribed to Rift which we play while we wait for lockouts to refresh.

They're rehashing old content, bringing back old bosses, reusing old boss models... clearly the game is on the back burner, so to speak. The pandas and Pokemon is just confirmation that they're working with limited resources and are struggling to keep subscriptions.

For the record, Pandarians didn't start as WarCraft canon, they started when Chris Metzen posted some concept art way back when on the WarCraft 3 beta forums, and he accidentally posted a picture he had drawn of a ninja panda and its cub. It kind of turned into a community mascot, eventually ending up as the Pandaren Brewmaster in TFT.

WoW was always a casual gamer's MMO, but the path it has taken is just dumbed down to Baby's First MMO. I plan on playing at least until the 5.0 patch, but in the meantime I've resubscribed to Rift (funny enough, word is the Deathwing fight is practically a carbon copy of Rift's Akylios fight), which has improved greatly since release and has tons of stuff to do, and I've also pre-ordered SWTOR... I'll be playing one of the two while Blizzard continues to euthanize their game.

They announced 11.1 active subscribers 3 months ago nearly to the day. They provide these numbers every three months, and have since the beginning of WoW Acti/Blizzard.

You could hear in Mike Morhaimes voice today a bit of concern, but it does appear they have a number of decent strategies to mitigate the losses, deal with ToR in the long term and even bring a lot of people back.

Edit: Correction, they have announced numbers since the beginning of Acti/Blizzard. I admit I do not know about how they handled it before the merger.

CVSiN wrote on Nov 8, 2011, 14:48:SWTOR is going to hurt them bad.. they are killing themselves..

I'll believe it when I see it. There's got to be a list somewhere of games that were going to kill WoW. EQ2? Aion? Rift? TOR? The list goes on and on.

Most people I know hate Cata. And WoW will die eventually, but no single game will be the cause (other than WoW 2.0).

EQ2 came out 'before' WoW, just FYI. I don't think any game will 'kill' WoW, but a solid MMOG could absolutely split their player base. As was said, they've lost millions of players since Cat hit (to the point where they've stopped announcing their subsciption numbers).

Cataclysm was a bad expansion, they spent too much time reworking Azeroth and not enough on delivering high level content to their player base. Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom is a fun place for your alts but no one wants to rehash lv 85 content in the same place they leveled 7 years ago.

No matter what anyone thinks Mists of Pandaria will be a better expansion than Cata, they learned their lesson and will improve on it. New race, new class, new continent, and all new game play features will help bring some fun back in Warcraft.

Of the handful of RL friends I have who still play WoW habitually, every one of them but one was like 'WTF?' when this was announced lol.

The whole 'we have a community that's really excited about what we're doing' is bullshit. Just watch the video of it's announcement. It's the most tepid response I've ever heard at a Blizzcon. Thousands of people crowd the area, and as few as a hundred were cheering, and perhaps more were making exasperated responses, or even booing.

To me this expansion is directly targeted at Asia, the only area where the games subscriber base is still growing. In the west, the game is slowly dying, to the point where Blizz all out refuses to give subscriber numbers anymore. So yea, Pokemon and Kungfu Panda's are for asia.

In the end of course they aren't going to admit this is jumping the shark, but thats exactly what it is.